Congress Hanging People Out To Dry: Revolution For The Hell Of It

It was a very good day in the Congress Thursday for hanging people out to dry. The White House hung Nancy Pelosi on the same clothesline on which John Boehner was hung by the howler monkeys in his caucus. The Cromnibus nearly broke down completely, leaving lobbyists and congresscritters in small knots by the side of a dark road, their breath steaming up the night air, waiting for another cromnibus to bring them all home from their day at the Two Hundred Chickens Casino and Bingo Hall.

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There are other, more anonymous people hung out to dry, too. Long-haul truck drivers will now drive longer shifts with less time for rest in between. (How the hell did that get into an appropriations bill? Shut up, they explained.) The sage grouse's time on this earth is just about up. Campaign finance took another step inside the gates of Mordor. And, of course, thanks to some impressive arm-twisting by a Democratic administration hell-bent on helping out a Republican speaker, the Unleash The Hounds derivatives provision sailed through. And the slow, steady and inexorable campaign to render this president a non-person in the long sweep of history continues apace.

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They will be doing some of it in order to curry favor with the oligarchs. They will be doing some of it just because they're mean. But the derivatives scam is the first step to unravelling financial reform, just as surely as the Halbig case is the last chance to unravel heath care reform. The basic goal of the political opposition in Congress, having thrown so much sand in the gears that it's a wonder the president got anything done, and the stated goal of the newer, more radical Congress that will be assembling in January, will be to undo everything he did accomplish until the presidency of Barack Obama vanishes from history as a kind of failed experiment. It is important to these people that the country not remember that it elected (twice) an African American Democratic president. It is important to people who have spent 40 years constructing their own private American history that their own private American history not include him.

I give Senator Professor Warren and the rest of them enormous credit for trying to remind the president, and the country, of this obvious fact. They made the House vote a helluva lot closer than it should have been, since Boehner needed every one of those 57 Democratic votes to get anything done at all. There's power building there. (Another indication that something is up is the sudden alliance between the Senator Professor and Senator Joe Manchin -- D-Anthracite --to oppose the nomination of Antonio Weiss to a post at Treasury. Were I Weiss, I might start making other plans.) The problem that the Senator Professor gives to the usual suspects in Washington is her native ability to explain complicated things simply, and with obvious credibility. This presents a particular difficulty for the people who have rigged the system with euphemism and Luntzian doublespeak. She refutes, clearly and directly, the notion within the elite political press that tactics should be judged on their effectiveness rather than on their effects. And she knows it, too.

Scott Brown learned this to his increasing dismay. What the Senator Professor doesn't know, she learns very, very quickly. At the beginning of the campaign, she couldn't put one foot in front of the other. And now, barely two years into her rookie term in the Senate, she damned near outmaneuvered the White House and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and she still may sink an ill-conceived presidential nomination. Call out the instigators.